Domain-Adapted Small Language Models for Reliable Clinical Triage
Accurate and consistent Emergency Severity Index (ESI) assignment remains a persistent challenge in emergency departments, where highly variable free-text triage documentation contributes to mistriage and workflow inefficiencies. This study evaluates whether open-source small language models (SLMs) can serve as reliable, privacy-preserving decision-support tools for clinical triage. We systematically compared multiple SLMs across diverse prompting pipelines and found that clinical vignettes, concise summaries of triage narratives, yielded the most accurate predictions. The SLM, Qwen2.5-7B, demonstrated the strongest balance of accuracy, stability, and computational efficiency. Through lar...
| Authors | Manar Aljohani, Brandon Ho, Kenneth McKinley et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 October 2026 |
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